Nietzsche’s untimeliness

Eros and Civilization: the title expressed an optimistic, euphemistic, even positive thought, namely, that the achievements of advanced industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction, liberty and repression—in other words to learn [Nietzsche's] gay science.— Herbert Marcuse.

In [ancient] philosophy the duties of human life were treated as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life. But when moral, as well as natural philosophy, came to be taught only as subservient to theology, the duties of human life were treated of as chiefly subservient to the happiness of a life to come. . . . [But even] in [what came to be called] the modern philosophy [perfecting virtue] was frequently represented as generally, or rather as almost always inconsistent with any degree of happiness in this life; and heaven was to be earned only by penance and mortification, by austerities and abasement of a monk; not by the liberal generous, and spirited conduct of man. — Adam Smith.

Photograph of Nietzsche, Paul Rée, and Lou Salome, circa 1882.

NIETZSCHE BELIEVED that gaining even a modicum of reason and freedom had to be a hard won, blood-soaked, and world-historical affair, but was nevertheless inclined to be as uncharitable in the extreme toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “the seducer” behind the idealist and rabble in the French Revolution, as toward the socialists who claimed to be the inheritors of the Jacobin tradition. He identified Of theSocial Contract—a meditation on the conditions of possibility for the radical self-determination of modern civilization—as putting forward the first image of modern man to inspire mortals to a “transfiguration” of their own circumstances. However, modern man turned out to be a creature afflicted with a fevered historical self-consciousness that periodically flared up in revolutions, “like Typhon under Etna.”[1] It was a symptom of this curious sickness, Nietzsche held, that had led the philosophizing son of a watchmaker to characterize man as a creature full of pity or empathy and as capable of perfectibility, while positing an unwarranted faith in nature as an idyll of freedom. Nietzsche saw modern civilization as a chimera, characterized by what Kant had referred to as “glittering misery” and by the creation invidious interdependencies, but had reached the opposite conclusion as the “Citizen of Geneva.” For Nietzsche, plunging further into the civilization that the latter abhorred “is precisely that which speaks in favor of civilization.”[2] For moderns, who were proving themselves unable to squarely take on the task of Enlightenment, it was as “reasonable” to consider a return to nature as it was for them to revive Greek tragedy; we moderns had no chance of ever going back to the state of nature—the state of nature was itself a myth that the dialectic of Enlightenment had necessitated.

Despite identifying “the labor question” as an intractable issue of the industrial age, Nietzsche never offered a clear resolution to the “the physiological self-contradiction” that defines capitalism. One can admit as much without either attempting to shape Nietzsche on a Marxist lathe—the accusation once leveled at Adorno—or giving in to the idea that Nietzsche was an elitist, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal conservative.[3] The efforts to “let workers be themselves” had failed, Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, as a result of “the most irresponsible negligence.” Nietzsche was apportioning fault for this “negligence” directly on the socialists, who were confounded as to why, in spite of the fact that workers had made enormous strides toward sociopolitical equality since the industrial revolution, and justifiably wanted more and felt “their existence to be desperate… aninjustice,” their demands for “a social democracy” could not be met by the vote and contractual rights. Europe had to answer the workers, while the workers tried to articulate their own demands and to answer, “What do theywill”?[4] But the socialists—those “superficial, envious, and three-quarter actors” infected with “nihilism”—had turned freedom into an ethic and so crab-walked backward into “a will to negate life.”[5] Further, their values were little more than refashioned Christian ideals rather than peculiarly modern aspirations; their certitude that a socialist revolution was inevitable was motivated by the same animalistic instincts that had led Christians to see the Last Judgment as “the sweet consolation of revenge.”[6] Such vituperations also masked the actual task of emancipation and left the socialists with the muddle-headed belief that, “[as] time marches forward… Everything that is in it also marches forward—that the development is one that moves forward.” Although, even “the most level-headed are led astray by this illusion,” Nietzsche claimed, “the nineteenth century does not represent progress per the sixteenth . . . . ‘Mankind’ does not advance, it does not even exist . . . . Man represents no progress over the animal: the civilized tenderfoot is an abortion.”[7] Despite the touted “progress” of the nineteenth over the eighteenth century, the socialists had overlooked or were unable to recover what earlier revolutionaries, inspired by the notion of the infallible sovereignty of the General Will, had understood—that rather than “dance in our ‘chains’” we had to break them.[8]

The case of anti-Nietzsche

The aristocratic antipathy in which Nietzsche held the Left is presumably one reason behind the leftist “anti-Nietzsche” stance. Others chafe at the fact that Nietzsche was a staunch individualist who clubbed the Marxist social-democrats together with the anarchists as well as with the Christian socialists; Nietzsche was satisfied to say that anarchism held “the same ideal [as socialism], but in a more brutal fashion,” while the dogmatic social-democrat who hypostatized class relations was in as bad faith as the Protestant minister who reconciled men to their wretched fate.[9] Malcolm Bull is the latest leftist to argue for an anti-Nietzsche stance. But with the critical difference that Bull’s criticism of Nietzsche is rooted in a conservatism that obfuscates the established tradition of left criticism of Nietzsche, which dates back to the revisionist debate. Bull compares Nietzsche to Durkheim, as both were diagnosticians who theorized that the incompleteness of our transition to modernity had manifested itself pathologically in what Nietzsche referred to as “decadence” or “nihilism,” and in what Durkheim called “anomie.” However, Bull argues, whereas Durkheim articulated a nervous optimism about “about the totalization of society” based on the cohesiveness of “organic solidarity”—the idea that society is an increasingly complex machine that adds up to more than the sum of its different components—Nietzsche wanted to effect “a return to mechanical solidarity,” a hierarchical, caste-based society with a shared collective conscience molded by Brahmanical overmen.[10] Durkheim, in other words, was a theorist of difference. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was a misogynistic romantic not much different from the predatory bird in On the Genealogy of Morals that wages “an all-out war against the defenseless” out of sheer hatred. But this misses the fact that Nietzsche was pointing out that there was little evidence society was progressively headed toward “organic solidarity,” behind the back of the actors involved, through the dialectic that Kant had termed “unsocial sociability.” Instead, Nietzsche had sensed—one wants to say, “presciently”—that modern society had turned self-destructive. Bull attributes to Nietzsche the nihilism that Nietzsche had identified in modern society, and in this comes closer to Heidegger, who criticized Nietzsche for giving up on phenomenology by instead proffering metaphysical answers to confront “nihilism” (the meaningless of life),[11] than to someone like Lukács. Bull is ultimately ambivalent about the idea that the “transvaluation of values” requires a “self-transfigurationequireself-sublation” of spirit. Yet it is precisely this motif in Nietzsche that resonates with the Left’s self-conception of its historical role.

The antecedents of left criticism of Nietzsche date back to the 1890s, when anarchist-inclined advocates of the ideas of Max Stirner publishing in the revisionist organ Sozialistische Monatschefte tried to appropriate Nietzsche to their cause. On the “orthodox” side, Franz Mehring mounted the criticism that, after 1848, conservatives had turned away from Hegel only to find their inspiration in Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer, Mehring contended, had only resulted in Nietzsche placing a laurel wreath on the class of exploitation and financial interests instead of on a class of aristocrats.[12] Nietzsche, in other words, failed to appreciate the revolutionary character of the working class and was accordingly seen as putting forward a philosophy of capitalism that was elitist. Nonetheless, Mehring was also clear that, “the Nietzsche cult is still more useful to socialism in another respect.” For those still growing up within the upper classes, Mehring remarked, “Nietzsche is only a transitional stage on the way to socialism.”[13] What Mehring suggests is that the critique of culture one finds in Nietzsche strikes notes that Marx himself was fond of playing before Engels introduced him to the categories of political economy; Nietzsche echoes Marx the Young Hegelian. A different strain of the “orthodox” criticism of Nietzsche is offered by the late-Lukács in the chapter from The Destruction of Reason (1952) on Nietzsche as the foundational irrationalist of the imperialist era. Nietzsche had, Lukács claimed, at least for a while, “consider[ed] socialism to be an ally of liberalism and democracy, their consummation carried to radical extremes,” but then came to treat the emancipation of workers as “a purely ideological issue….[when in] fact the question had objective economic foundations.”[14] After the failure of the revolutions of 1918-19 and the experience of the Second World War, Lukács, in the last, also succumbed to the temptation to see Nietzsche as expressing “certain methodological affinities with Romantic anti-capitalism.” Lukács neither made an effort to grasp the depth of the historical defile that separated Nietzsche from Marx nor to rehearse the arguments he had made so ably decades before, precisely that, through their criticisms of the socialists of their age, Nietzsche and Marx were grappling with what Lukács himself had referred to in History and Class Consciousness as the antinomies of bourgeois thought. The late-Lukács also slides over the pressing query: What is Marxism if not an ideology—if not a “necessary form of appearance” —that demands further development through critique?

Nietzsche after the Left

At a seminar on Nietzsche held in the summer of 1942 in Los Angeles, the conversation between the transplanted members of the Frankfurt School had shifted to trying to appraise whether, in postulating the self-transformation of animalistic man into “superman,” Nietzsche had cleft to the notion of utopia, “the sermon on the mount as well as the classless society.”[15] Günther Anders was skeptical of the claim. Nietzsche, Anders held, had articulated an affirmative worldview that centered on the idea of amor fati, the acceptance of fate. Horkheimer countered that what was apparently affirmative in Nietzsche was in fact an effect of the ideological character of attempting to overcome capitalism, which as a system of domination was capable of “satisfy[ing] most of our material needs as well as allay[ing] the causes of our fear.” “What binds us to Nietzsche,” Adorno then remarked, is that “Nietzsche stands in relationship to Bebel [co-founder of the SPD] only in the sense that [Nietzsche] uses [Bebel] to specify things that in reality are ideology.” He was successful in “perceiv[ing] that not only democracy, but also socialism has become an ideology.” And “in certain critical respects, Nietzsche had progressed further than Marx,” in that Nietzsche had identified certain aspects of the dialectic of capital that were not to be found in the critique of political economy. Herbert Marcuse interjected, “If Marx is right, then Nietzsche is wrong.” Anders relented slightly: “One can use Marx to interpret Nietzsche, but not vice versa. Nietzsche is not a revolutionary who wanted to transform the world.” But Adorno rode the steed hard:

Nietzsche realized that the idea of socialism is tied to a concept of praxis that is not merely a reflection of society. Marx could only say that it is naturally a reflection of society. On the other hand, it seems that already in Nietzsche’s day the whole nexus of concepts like praxis, organization, and so forth, showed a side whose implications are becoming only apparent today. Nietzsche withdrew from the demands of the day for the sake of advancing a number of the categories in question. He understood that, in and of itself, the concept of praxis is inadequate to differentiate between a barbarian and a non-barbarian world. . . . All inclusive, all-defining praxis has a tendency to continue to reproduce the form of domination over and above domination as such. . . . Nietzsche’s aversion for all questions having to do with man’s material existence certainly has its negative side, but it also shows that he understood that there is something bad about the concept of total praxis . . . . Thus the seriousness of culture. Otherwise one runs the risk of transforming socialism into a pragmatism magnified to planetary dimensions.[16]

Nietzsche, on this view, was a critic of a culture that remains individualistic and a critic of the socialism of the Marxist SPD as an affirmative ideology—as a symptomatic but necessary form of appearance. Adorno was also pointing out that Marx had optimistically hoped that the socialists, through a combination of theory and praxis immanent to capital, might achieve a historical consciousness adequate to the task of getting beyond capital. Nietzsche, on the other hand, had troublingly—in the sense of what is “unfashionable” or “untimely”—raised the specter that the weight of incomplete and thus failed revolutions had vitiated life, led man into “unstable equilibrium between ‘animal and angel,’” and forced the recognition that “we are unknown to ourselves.” Adorno thus implies that Nietzsche, but also Rousseau for that matter, will remain valid until the desiderata that Marx had identified are fulfilled—a task made exponentially more difficult since the Left lost its will-to-power Nietzsche, in placing “the whole question of the relationship between communism and anarchism in its second phase,” Adorno concluded, had shifted the onus of trying to realize the values of liberal emancipation, by deepening the analysis and critique of capitalism, back on to the socialists.

Nihilism and History

Nietzsche characterized the sustained crisis of culture, civilization, and life—what we might summarize as capitalism—through its symptoms: nihilism (meaninglessness), historical spirit (historicism), and eternal return (endless repetition). “Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence,” Nietzsche hypothesized, might lead an extra-planetary astronomer to the conclusion that life on earth was marked by a distinctive asceticism, “a nook of disgruntled, arrogant and offensive creatures” filled with a disgust for everything and gleaning a sadistic satisfaction in their self-inflicted wounds.[17] “For man is more sick, uncertain, changeable, indeterminate than any other animal, there is no doubt of that…[H]ow did this come about?”[18] Although man had braved more and “challenged fate” more than all the other animals, as an “experimenter with himself, discounted and insatiable,” man was grappling with “animals, nature, and gods for ultimate dominion.” The future itself had its “own restless energies” that never left man to himself peacefully, but instead this “future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present.”[19] Nietzsche, in attempting to think through the historical inversions, the self-destructiveness, and self-transformation of the manner in which mankind had overcome nature wonders out loud: How are we to cross that abyss? How had our values come to devalue themselves? What makes “history” relevant to the future? Through the eyes of Zarathustra Nietzsche saw that “man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss.”[20] (That Zarathustra descends from priestly ascetics rather than aristocrats reveals far more about what Nietzsche thought of himself than do allegories about predatory birds or blond beasts.)

As Richard Schacht argues, the development of man, as Nietzsche saw the matter, is not the result of “accidental change, or Heraclitan flux, or the actualization of potentiality.”[21] Self-transfiguration involves a transformation of nature, more precisely a struggle to overcome our “second natures…[which] are mostly feebler than the first.”[22] Or, as Marx wrote in the 1844 manuscripts, “The nature which come to be in human history…is man’s real nature….History is itself a real part of natural history—of nature’s coming to be man”—history can be both a development in but also beyond nature.[23] But with the option of going back to first nature foreclosed, man, who is self-conscious of a life led well or poorly, had to treat the symptoms of our modern sickness—which is analogous to the sickness of pregnancy: that which must be labored through to deliver a new life.[24] The contemporary crisis of meaninglessness had to be situated, therefore, as Nietzsche argues in Beyond Good and Evil, on the 10,000 year timeline of the history of humanity, for most of which the value of man was tied to the consequences of his actions.

During the longest part of human history—so-called prehistorical times—the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences. The action itself was considered as little as its origin….[T]he imperative “know thyself!” was as yet unknown. In the last ten thousand years, however, one has reached the point, step by step, in a few large regions of the earth, where it is no longer the consequences but the origin of an action that one allows to decide its value….[which] involves the first attempt at self-knowledge….Instead dog the consequences, the origin: indeed the reversal of perspective!…But today—shouldn’t we have reached the necessity of once more resolving on a reversal and fundamental shift in values, owing to another self-examination of man, another growth in profundity? [25]

The cultural norms or “morality of mores” of classical antiquity—a primally animalistic attachment to domination—had transitioned, only after extreme reversals, into class society, marked by liberal democratic values. The “slave revolt” had affected the transvaluation of values. What followed was the defection of the clerics to the side of the slaves, which explains the world-historical significance of Christianity, until the passing of traditional metaphysics rendered life meaningless—but this was also “only a transitional stage.”[26] The rise of class society, in other words, raises the possibility of a transition to whatever is beyond this life-form, but to realize what Nietzsche cryptically refers to as “the gay scienceo involves accepting a difficult task: replacing the antiquarian historicist sensibilities that were sapping life with a critical approach from a supra-historical stance that revivifies life, giving it a telos, in the Hegelian sense, as a direction, rather than as a final end-point. Nietzsche zoomorphizes us so that as we shed our animalistic nature. We might then continue to ask: Are we late- or first-comers?[27]

Original stage design by Paul von Joukowsky for Act III of Parsifal circa 1882. Nietzsche felt that Wagner’s last opera, a story of redemption, had allowed asceticism and nihilism to triumph over art.

Just as the disappointment of the emancipatory aspirations of 1848 had led Wagner to compose Parsifal as a tale of salvation, utilitarians “à“la Comte and [John] Stuart Mill” had theorized “the insipid and cowardly concept of ‘man,’” which, Nietzsche remarked with an acerbic bite, was a notion that was more suited to “the object of a cult.”[28] What Nietzsche was saying was that, in regressing behind the eighteenth century, moderns were left vulnerable to vulgarization of thought by “the cultivated Philistines” who, Adorno quips, in the 1942 seminar, will only disappear when everyone can find “enough to eat”), which was also Nietzsche’s own title for the first “untimely meditation” on David Strauss. The socialists in the SPD manifested this self-vivisection in accepting the ideas of the antisemite Eugen Dühring, “that Berlin apostle of revenge who employs moral mumbo-jumbo more indecently and repulsively than anyone else.”[29] Nietzsche offered a heuristic for this historical devaluation of our values in Twilight of the Idols: “Liberal institutions stop being liberal as soon as they have been attained: after that, nothing damages freedom more terribly or more thoroughly than liberal institutions.” Yet, “as long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions have entirely different effects and are actually powerful promoters of freedom. On closer inspection, it is the war that produces these effects, the war forliberal institutions which, being a war, keeps illiberal institutions in place. And the war is what teaches people to be free.”[30] Freedom,” Nietzsche concluded, “[in] the sense I understand the word: [is] something that you have and do not have, that you will, that you win.”

If workers, as the socialists claimed, were going to not simply live “…one day as the bourgeois do now, but [really] above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants,” the socialists had to first shed their urge to “condemn, libel, and denigrate society” and their blind faith in historical development. Nietzsche thus outlines a philosophy of history that calls our attention to the regression in “progress.” He confronts the vexation: How is this new historical consciousness, the nineteenth century historicist thought exemplified by the right-Hegelians, disadvantageous to life but also potentially what we require for life? What if moderns lived at the expense of the future? How might our values be the source of enervation? Faced with these difficulties, modern man, who is generationally the result of earlier “aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes,” wishes in vain for an existence like that of animal enthralled only in the moment, that is, without a sense of yesterday or the future, thus neither bored nor melancholy.[31] Animals are unhistorical, while man, on the other hand, resists the ever growing weight of what was. “This is why [man] is moved, as though he remembered a lost paradise, when he sees a grazing herd, or, in a more intimate proximity, sees a child, which as yet has nothing past to deny, playing between fences of past and future in blissful blindness.”[32] Although we can cultivate a forgetful or unhistorical disposition, or conversely obsess over historical details, both methods risk what Nietzsche calls “a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is…[which is] my formula for amor fati.”[33] The supra-historical task consists in grasping a knife and going at what had come before without reverence.[34] “Our inherited customary nature and our knowledge” had to be brought into conflict, “in fact, even into a war n [in order to] cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature atrophies.”[35] A historical genealogy is therefore “an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a posteriori a past from which one would like to be descended in opposition to the past from which we descended,” although the obstacle was “perceiving not merely the necessity of those sides of existence hitherto denied, but their desirability; and not their desirability merely in relation to the sides hitherto affirmed.”[36]

Conclusion

Nietzsche came of age with the Franco-Prussian War and was lucid while Bismark was Chancellor. His first-hand experience with the savagery of war confirmed Nietzsche as the first anti-German. It also made odious the triumphalism that marked the rise of Bismarck. German self-satisfaction was rooted in a false sense of accomplishment. The French defeat marked the collapse of the revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1871, Nietzsche believed, more than it heralded the advance of authentic Teutonic or Protestant culture. Berlin was a counterfeit new Athens; the semblance of poetry, music, and philosophy was insufficient to the immanence of the task of modern life. The victories on the battlefield were sure to exorcise the spirits of 1848 but perniciously. Nietzsche attacked the evasions of the 1848-revolutionaries-turned-anti-Semities as decadent, in bad faith, mendacious, and desperate to ape the modern. But the socialists, who had turned dogmatic, were equally in bad faith. It is as if Nietzsche were specifically pointing to the Left when identifying “the species of moral masturbators” gesturing like invalid Pharissees filled with “noble indignation.” How were the socialists, who were themselves afflicted with the belief that, “[as] time marches forward… everything that is in it also marches forward,” going to then serve “as physicians, consolers, and ‘saviors’ of the sick”?[37]

Nietzsche was, in a lot of ways, a typical liberal of the late nineteenth century, expressing a concern with conformism, mass or herd society, and authoritarianism. His inner affinities and differences with Hegel and Marx can be productively specified in the twist that each delivers to their Rousseauian conviction that a consciousness of history and the task of freedom are interdependent. The main differences between them can be attributed to the events of the mid-nineteenth century that mark a historical watershed, on one side of which stands Hegel, on the other Marx and Nietzsche. Hegel had attempted to supersede the contradiction between romanticism and enlightenment. But whereas Hegel saw the romantic view of history as a necessary stage of modernity, and Marx saw the metaphysics of historical Spirit attendant to the emergence of the state as the rational core of Hegel, for Nietzsche modernity had degenerated into melancholy. Nietzsche was acutely aware of the exhaustion within the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which, unable to manage itself within the framework of parliamentary democracy, had collapsed into Bonapartist authoritarianism under Bismarck.

After 1848, Nietzsche remarked, “workers were enlisted for the military, they were given the right to organize, the political right to vote: is it any wonder that workers today feel their existence to be desperate (expressed morally—to be an injustice)?” As it happened, Nietzsche had reason to doubt whether their demands were pointing toward was the realization—completion and transfiguration—of the values of liberal emancipation. The developments of the last 100 years make the relationship between Nietzsche and Marx inevitably more opaque than it was for the revolutionary Marxists of the early nineteenth century. Both were harsh critics of the socialists of their day, but whereas Marx (and Engels) saw in the struggle for socialism signs of that struggle “pointing beyond itself,” toward the establishment of the classless society, Nietzsche saw only widespread resentment as the final destination of the socialist movements. This major difference, so crucial when the international socialist movement was expanding and a new era of revolutionary history was on the horizon, has receded behind the history of the 20th century. Any attempt to reckon with our present impasse inevitably comes to ask: “What is there to recover?” It is in light of this task that Marx and Nietzsche are not flatly counterposed, but are different critics of an object that disintegrated before it fulfilled its most vital aspirations. |P

The Platypus Affiliated Society, established in December 2006, organizes reading groups, public fora, research and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the “Old” (1920s-30s), “New” (1960s-70s) and post-political (1980s-90s) Left for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.